


Second Degree Love

by Slowprogress



Series: Love is the best medicine [2]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/F, It's also super cliched, Tried to write crack fic, so many tropes man, turns out it's all feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-14
Updated: 2016-02-14
Packaged: 2018-05-20 11:39:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6004531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slowprogress/pseuds/Slowprogress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lexa is set on fire by a student.  </p>
<p>Unfortunately she means this in the most literal sense possible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Second Degree Love

**Author's Note:**

> How many tropes can I fit into one fic you ask? Many tropes. All the tropes. If you don't believe me, just read the story.

A student sets her on fire. She means this, unfortunately, literally.

She isn't surprised in the least that it's Reyes that does it, but what does surprise her is the fact that it's accidental. It's really just simple bad luck that she's walking past Raven's bench right as the girl bumps a glass beaker off it's surface, Lexa reaching out to catch it on impulse. It's bad luck that she mostly fumbles the catch, smashing her hand and the beaker into the side of the solid bench, glass embedding itself deeply into the palm of her hand as it breaks. Worse luck still is the fact that she looks up just in time to see a shocked Raven reach out to help steady her, completely ignoring the _lit_ bunsen burner in front of her, so that Lexa has absolutely no choice but to reach across said flame herself with her bloodied hand to stop Raven from burning herself.

Which brings her back to the part where a student set her on fire. Or she set herself on fire for a student. Whatever. Point is Lexa's linen shirt sleeve caught fire, because of course it would after a few drops of butane gas had splashed onto it earlier, and then there was a lot of screaming and screetching as students lost their heads. Which would have been fine, really, Lexa could handle a bleeding hand and a sleeve mildly on fire, but then Jasper started shouting about stopping, dropping and rolling followed by Green oh so heroically tackling her in a misguided attempt to get her to do just that.

Things went downhill from there. Not that it had been going so great up to that point, but yeah. It got worse. She landed awkwardly on her elbow, the one that was definitely on fire at that point, feeling pain explode up her arm all the way to the tips of her fingers. She isn't proud of the sharp, short shout she let out at the sensation.

The Reyes kid didn't look like she enjoyed having to use the fire extinguisher on her, so at least there was that.

Anya called 911 when she found Lexa sitting on the floor of her own science lab, shirt half burned off, hand a bleeding mess and pretty much unable to move her arm, Monty Green still halfway on top of her. Lexa hoped to God no one thought to take pictures. Or video for that matter, she in no way wanted to end up as an unwilling Youtube sensation, thank you very much.  
By the time the paramedics arrive, Lexa is pale and sweating, her arm a throbbing, swollen mess of blistered skin and what she's willing to bet is broken bones of some kind. Fantastic way to start her day, really. She insists on walking herself to the ambulance, too stubborn to show her students that she's as close to crying in public as she's ever been, but once she's inside the ambulance she can't help herself. The adrenalin has worn off, she feels every movement of the paramedics fingers on her arm and she not so quietly bursts into tears. It's not very dignified.

Upside to that? Morphine.

Beautiful, _beautiful_ Morphine. Morphine is her new lady love, something she takes great pleasure in telling the paramedic that administered it in the first place by the time they're pushing her into the E.R. He doesn't really say anything other then mumbling about low tolerance, but he smiles kindly enough at her. Lexa likes him. He has super fluffy hair and faint freckles. He's pretty for a guy, something she doesn't realize she's said out loud until he blushes faintly and rolls his eyes.

When they slide her onto one of the unoccupied beds, she reaches out with her good hand and takes him around the wrist.

“You really are very pretty, but I'm gay. Very, very gay. Sorry.” She nods gravely once and lets go of his wrist and leans back against the bed, happy she cleared that up.

“Okay, thanks for sharing that I guess.” He's smilingly shaking his head, the motion making the aforementioned fluffy hair sway gently across his forehead and Lexa finds herself mesmerised by it. Once he stops, she focuses back on him.

“I just didn't want to lead you on. It's not very nice to do that to people, so...” It isn't very nice and Lexa prides herself on being, well, if not always nice, then at least polite.

He chuckles lightly and it makes his slightly curly hair bounce. Lexa wants to reach up and touch it, doesn't realize she's doing just that until slender fingers wrap around her wrist and gently tugs her hand back down to the bed.

“No touching, Lexa.” Anya sounds stern, but her eyes are crinkled at the corners and she's biting down on her bottom lip, looking awfully amused.

Lexa frowns. It's an injustice for hair that soft and bouncy to not be petted and she's about to make her case for it when a gentle chuckle catches her attention. When she turns and finds the source of the sound, she gasps. Loudly, dramatically, because standing beside her bed in blue scrubs and a white doctor's coat is Clarke Griffin.

_Clarke Griffin!_

She whips her head back to Anya, eyes large and solemn as she grabs a fistful of her friend and colleague's shirt, and tugs her closer.

“Anya, it's _her_.” She waits for this very important admission to rock Anya's world as it just did hers, but when she gets nothing but a mildly confused stare, she shoves her friend away again and turns back to the woman on her other side. “It's _you_.”

Clarke's eyes are as blue and as kind as Lexa remembers them, so it's only natural that she lets herself get a little bit lost in them. She's aware that Anya is saying something, can hear the paramedic with the awesome hair add to the conversation, but she's pretty focused on the warm smile that's slowly creeping across Clarke's face. She sighs a little and feels her own mouth mirroring the action.

“Good to know I left an impression on my favourite teacher. So what brings you into my ER, Miss Woods? Need a Doctor's note to get out of school?” Clarke laughs at her own little joke and Lexa's heart just about beats itself out of her chest. Even Clarke's laugh is as magical as she remembers.

“Nope, student set me on fire.” Lexa thinks over her statement for a second and can't help but burst out laughing. “A student set me on fire, but like, literally this time. I was on literal fire.”

Her laughing comes to an abrupt halt when she jostles her arm against the bed, hot prickles of pain shooting up her arm. “Ow.” She pouts a little.

Clarke scrunches up her face in sympathy and reaches out to Lexa's arm, fingers gentle as she examines her elbow. “So you've been set on fire by a student before, but not literally? How does that work exactly?”

Clarke's voice is soft, soothing, and the question distracts Lexa from the discomfort the prodding fingers are causing.

“They look into your eyes and set your heart on fire.” Everyone around her bed abruptly freezes, but Lexa barely registers it, just hums a little wistfully as she looks at Clarke. “You've always had such fine eyes.”

They stare at each other for what feels like a very long time, Lexa still with a half smile on her face and Clarke with some indecipherable look on hers, until someone clears their throat.

Pretty boy with the awesome fluffy curls is giving her a weirdly judging look, eyebrows raised and head cocked. “You make it a habit to let students set you on fire in that way?”

Lexa shakes her head, taken back to that first year after she graduated and started teaching, remembering what it felt like when Clarke Griffin set her on fire.

“God no, that first time was terrible enough. You know, I seriously thought about quitting my job, but I had student loans and I'd signed a lease on an apartment and I couldn't get out of it. I stayed and it hurt a lot more than getting set on fire the second time.” Lexa looked down at her arm and shook her head. “God damn Reyes...”

Fingers slid around her wrist again and she looked at Anya, not understanding the firm squeeze or the dark cloud that was suddenly thundering across her face.

“Maybe Doctor Griffin here could do her job and actually help you instead of letting her colleague ask you very personal and very _incriminating_ questions when you're obviously under the influence of strong medication. Or better yet, why don't we find you a different doctor.”

Lexa let her eyes drift uncertainly from Anya to Clark, her lady love morphine making it difficult to understand why there was suddenly tension in the air as the two engaged in a weird stare off.

“I can assure you that I'm perfectly capable of doing my job, there's no need to find another doctor. As for anything incriminating being said, you don't have to worry since I can unequivocally say nothing untoward ever happened. She never...” Here Clark drifted off and gave Lexa that undecipherable look again. “No one's in trouble here, no ones making accusations.”

Lexa was really, _really_ lost. She was also possibly really, _really_ stoned, because she would swear to God she just saw a shark elegantly waltz through the room in a three piece suit.

“That shark has really sweet moves. I'm somewhat jealous, I've never really thought of myself as a good dancer.” No one seemed to have much to say to that statement other than Pretty Curls once again mumbling about low tolerance and she finds herself blinking slowly up at the ceiling. “I want a Pop-tart.”

Clarke huffed a laugh and patted her knee.

“Right, lets get you up to X-Ray.”

-&-

A few hours later Lexa was stitched, bandaged and fitted with a sling for her cracked elbow. She was also, to her great misfortune, completely sobered up. Also very aware of the fact that she made an absolute fool of herself. Years and years she'd kept the disaster that was her first year of teaching to herself, only to finally blurt out her most shameful secret in her drugged up haze.

She didn't like thinking about it, but who would? What kind of a person fell in love with their student. Their _high school_ student. It didn't matter that Lexa herself had been no more then twenty two at the time, she had felt such guilt over the matter for years that she knows it affected how she treated her students from that point onwards. They call her The Commander behind her back, her almost militant approach to teaching meaning that she wasn't always well liked by the general student populace, but her classes always had a very high pass rate and she gave her kids the best damn education that she could. She just didn't feel the need to hold their hand and learn their life story along the way. She made that mistake once and she almost crossed a line because of it.

She's pulled from her thoughts by the curtain that had surrounded her bed being pushed aside, Clarke's face appearing in it's place.

“Hey, thought I'd pop in and tell you we're letting you go soon.”

Lexa simply bit down hard in an attempt to swallow down her humiliation and nodded, jaw tense and bulging. Clarke watched her quiet display and sighed softly, stepping into Lexa's little curtained off cubicle.

“I'm sorry.”

Lexa looked up and frowned at Clark's words, shifting up against the pillows behind her so she could finally look the other woman in the eye.

“You have absolute nothing to apologize for. If anyone here should be apologizing it's me, I'm the one that...” She couldn't bare to say it out loud again. Couldn't look Clarke in the face and admit again how weak Lexa herself had been all those years ago.

“Come on, this is ridiculous! You don't actually have anything to apologize for. You never said or did anything inappropriate towards me, so what if you thought I was hot?” Clarke sat on the bed by her knees, face kind and smiling and Lexa stupidly felt herself flush.

“I was in love with you. You were a seventeen year old girl that looked up to me, trusted me enough to tell me about your sadness after your father's death, and instead of being a decent human being and stepping back when I realized my feelings, I encouraged you to talk to me. I _liked_ that you talked to me. It was a violation of trust, whether you knew about my feelings or not. I used my position as your teacher to further a personal relationship between us because it made me happy. How do I not owe you an apology, Clarke?”

The smile had long since dropped from Clarke's face, but she didn't look angry. It was mostly sadness and regret painted across her face now.

“You don't owe me an apology, because talking to you got me through the hardest time of my life. Talking to you helped to remind me that even though my father was dead, I still had a whole life with so much potential ahead of me, reminded me that I had a mother that loved me and needed me. You talked me back to life and I can never quite tell you how thankful I am for that.”

Clarke shifted closer, her fingers a warm, drifting pressure across the top of Lexa's hand.

“You weren't taking advantage of me, you weren't being selfish by talking to me. If you'd done what you thought was the right thing, if you distanced yourself from me so you could pat yourself on the back and sleep better knowing you'd done the _decent_ thing, that would have hurt me. I would have had no one that understood, I would have had to deal with all of that on my own. You made things harder on yourself to make everything else easier for me, how is that not the actions of a good person?”

Lexa pulled her hand back and pursed her lips, trying her very best to keep some distance from Clarke. She had spent so many years judging herself for her actions, her feelings, that it was hard even now to not feel a measure of shame for simply having this conversation.

“You make it all sound so noble, but it really wasn't, Clarke.” When Clarke merely raises her eyebrow in question, Lexa sighs and looks away. “I had Finn Collins in detention for a solid two months after he cheated on you. I gave him a B- on a paper that was actually a solid A. I treated a student unfairly simply because he hurt you and I wanted to punish him for it. I was a terrible teacher, because my feelings for you made me selfish and weak.”

Lexa finally looks towards Clarke again and, much like all those years earlier, meeting those eyes sets her heart unexpectedly on fire.

“What I felt for you wasn't pure, it wasn't innocent. I thought about the way you'd taste, the way you'd feel against me. I thought about how you would sound if I...God, Clarke, I thought those things about a _seventeen_ year old girl.”

There's suddenly not a lot of space between them, Clarke having leaned over and planted her hands firmly on the bed beside Lexa's shoulders, her breath a warm rush across her face.

“And the seventeen year old girl thought them about you too, but I never did anything about it. I never did, because you never encouraged me to do anything, you never gave me a single reason to believe you saw me as anything more than another student. So stop beating yourself up about something that never even happened and concentrate on the fact that I'm not seventeen any more and you're not my teacher now. We are both consenting adults that have every right to make out with each other if we want to.”

When Lexa had nothing to say to this, still a little stuck on the part where Clarke Griffin was so close to her she could smell the soap on her skin, Clarke rolled her eyes and huffed an impatient breath out. “This is the part where we passionately kiss.”

Lexa swallowed hard, pulse suddenly a loud drumbeat in her ears and air magically disappearing from her lungs.

“Isn't there a rule about Doctors kissing their patients?” Lexa hated how her voice trembled just slightly as she spoke, how her eyes were unable to look at anything other than Clarke Griffin's beautiful, wonderful face, but as always she was utterly affected by the other woman's mere existence.

Before Lexa had the opportunity to cut off whatever Clarke was about to say to that by finally pressing their lips together, the curtain to her little cubicle was once again pushed open.

“Miss Woods, I just wanted to...oh, sorry, didn't mean to interrupt.” The paramedic who'd brought her in was hovering uncomfortably by the foot of the bed, eyes bouncing from Lexa to Clark and back.

“You have five second to get lost, Bellamy, or I swear to God I'll surgically remove your balls and give them back to you in a jar.” Clarke said all of this with her eyes still firmly locked onto Lexa's, her upper body still mere inches from touching Lexa's own.

“Right, of course, just keep in mind they're brining her the discharge papers in about 5 minutes from now.” With that he left, the curtain fluttering back into place and isolating them from the rest of the floor.

Clarke kissed her then, long and hard, mouth a heated pressure that shot pleasure and longing straight down the length of her spine. She slipped her uninjured hand up to Clarke's neck, used the pulse that beat steadily against her palm to help tether her to the moment, to keep her grounded. She needed it, because kissing Clarke Griffin was like trying to hold a star in your hand. It set her on fire and burnt her from the inside out, light bursting from the cracks between her fingers until she had to close her eyes as it exploded outwards into the dark in brilliant, glittering shards.

Love was a star gone supernova.

When Clarke pulled back, when her lips still drifted across the corner of Lexa's mouth like she couldn't escape Lexa's gravity, she wondered if maybe Clarke too had stars exploding in her chest. That maybe Lexa wasn't alone in this, that maybe they were always meant to feel that pull, regardless of wrong or right. So she pressed back up, kissed her just once, softly, a small promise, before finally pushing her away.

They didn't say anything for a while, Clarke just playing with Lexa's fingers and smiling softly, Lexa trying to put out the flames that their kiss had lit.

“I think I might have to thank Reyes for, you know, lighting me on fire. Can't really say it wasn't worth it.”

Clarke chuckled, fingers twining with Lexa's own.

“So you didn't mind the morphine high, the second degree burn, the seven stitches and the fractured elbow?”

Lexa shook her head, smiled shyly. “Not at all, not if it means I got to kiss you. Not if it means I get to kiss you again.” It was a question said as a statement, because a part of Lexa was still a little guilty, still a little unsure she was allowed to do this, to _feel_ this.

Clarke obviously had no such qualms since she leaned down again, kissed her cheek sweetly, innocently, mouth making promises of her own.

“Maybe I'm a little bit glad you got set on fire too.”

**Author's Note:**

> I told you guys, so many tropes! We sort of had teacher/student, doctor/patient and drugged up and not able to filter what they're saying. Anyway, this got away from me, but I'm posting it anyway. Hope you enjoyed since I haven't liked writing so much since my Spashley fic days man.


End file.
